Something Random

[Mercutio]

Man, I don't think anything Compaq made deserved a decent reputation even into the mid-90s when 486s started to become mainstream.
I should note that was the point when product lines started to segregate and we got consumer and business systems, but Compaq was always one of those companies that could fuck up making ice. Its business machines would be full of different-sized Torx screws and easy access to nothing, which made them an absolute nightmare to work on.

I'm sure I've made this point before, but I remember being able to boot off USB on the very first IBM desktops I ever saw with USB ports. I had an extremely exotic 4GB 3.5" drive in a USB enclosure for doing data transfers in 1998 or 1999. Seeing that it was a boot option on those guys led me to install DOS on it and sure enough, that shit could start that PC. Which is the world of difference between how IBM did things and what Compaq was doing with its engineering. I have an IBM laptop from that era that could also boot from USB. Thinkpad 600, maybe?

(I actually have a collection of Thinkpads in my bedroom closet that's about four feet high. They're the retro-hardware I'm most likely to keep)

Regarding the drive size limit, Compaq (and later HP) had a bunch of BIOS programmers on staff, so when working with their products back in the day, it was extremely common for fixes to be BIOS updates instead of OS patches. It's very possible that your laptop had an update that's been lost to time since I'm sure those updates are long gone from the internet at this point.

 

[sedrosken]

I've seen some ridiculous uptime figures and heard stories of Deskpro ENs in particular living through stuff they really had no business doing. Yeah, the torx screw thing is annoying, and is where you can see the Compaq DNA in HPe machines today easiest, but they're also slotted, and I like the way they enclosed the slot rather than cutting the entire way through the head like IBM did on their hex-head bolts. I've had a handful of Aptivas and PC300GLs and such and they all use that annoying hex head with the slippery slot for a flathead.

I can't really blame Compaq for not doing something that basically no one else did aside from IBM at that time. Look how many times they'd been wrong about the direction of the PC industry by that point. MCA, anyone? Maybe a sprinkling of OS/2? USB booting wouldn't become common until the Core2 era, maybe the late P4 timeframe. And considering I can write a plop image to a floppy or CD and force platforms to boot from USB that really shouldn't (even a 486, if you stick a PCI USB card in one) I find it's a forgivable flaw in $currentYear.

I'm not saying Compaq went south for no reason -- buying DEC was probably a misstep, as much of a sure thing as it seemed at the time -- but I will always lament that it was Compaq that died out, and not HP. Notice how once the acquisition was pushed through, the Vectra line just sort of quietly went away... Almost like it was forgettable in the first place.

Interesting point about the BIOS upgrades, but I bet it's a moot point on this, where the name of the game was clearly to shit it out onto the market and capitalize on the sub-2000 dollar notebook market as much as they could before the internals were hopelessly obsolete 6 months from release. The Presarios were consumer grade machines, I'd be willing to bet the BIOS updates only really came for the enterprise gear where support contracts would have been involved.